On the Road with Fred

PHIL LESH - With A Little Help From His Friends

Shortly after the birth of his first son in 1986, famed Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh decide to do "responsible thing and applied for life insurance." The resulting physical showed Lesh to have a little known liver disease called Hepatitis C, an event that would change, in fact save, his life.

"By the time I was diagnosed with Hep C (when a test was developed in 1991)," Lesh recalls, "I was a happily married man, father to two beautiful, healthy sons, and ready to deal with my health. At that time there wasn't much information available, and few treatments with much promise, so I became a vegetarian, sought out alternative methods to strengthen my immune system and exercised daily. "

With the Grateful Dead in their prime, at least from a money-making stand point, not to mention having a family to care for, Lesh followed his doctors advise and also stopped drinking in 1990, yet his health continued to decline.

"It was easy to be in denial about my health during those years," he says. "There was so much stress, and I was in my mid-fifties, so I blamed a lot of the symptoms on aging. I was thin and losing muscle but I was still very active."

By the mid 1990's, Lesh's career, and his very life, seemed to be deteriorating.

"1995 was a very difficult year for me," he calls. "Within weeks I lost Jerry (Garcia) and my father-in-law, who died after a brief battle with liver cancer caused from Hepatitis C. My family was racked with grief from these two huge losses. I also had the unpleasant task of dealing with the fact that there was not going to be any touring income to cover the unbelievably large overhead at Grateful Dead Productions. I believe that stress of those times lit the fuse of my hepatitis and allowed the virus to rage. I feel that my major decline started in 1995 and by 1998, I was in end-stage liver disease, and knew I'd have to have a transplant.

"In early September 1998," he continues, "after dinner I suddenly felt horribly ill and then started vomiting copious amounts of blood. I lost a third of my blood that night, and for the next month had periodic internal bleeding and blood transfusions. This was the beginning of what we called crisis mode. Jill (his wife) didn't leave my side for three months for fear I would hemorrhage; she slept on the floor next to me at the hospital because I was experiencing one crisis after another- she was told three different times that I very likely wouldn't make it through the night.

"After a month of emergency room visits and weeks of hospital stays I had a shunt put in to help relieve the pressure on my liver. The shunt helped for a while, and I was able to gain a little weight back. However, within months it clogged up and I was back in a dangerous position. Meanwhile, we did a lot of research on liver transplant centers and decided to list with the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, FL. They had an incredible team of doctors that I connected with right away, a short list and a small nurturing hospital for recovery."

With the surviving members of the Dead having parted ways following Garcia's death in 1995, Lesh had started to play with a revolving ensemble of all-star musicians, with "Friends" including Jeff Pevar, Robben Ford, Jorma Kaukonen, Trey Anastasio and Page McConnell of Phish, Billy Payne and Barrere of Little Feat, David Crosby, former Dead band mates Bob Weir and Bruce Hornsby, and drummer John Molo, who has been the one constant in Phil's band since his first shows in 1997.

"John Molo is a dream drummer for me," Lesh proudly says. "I mean, his flexibility and knowledge of all kinds of exotic rhythms and his imagination - Duke Ellington says, 'The drummer is the bandleader,' and that's surely true of John."

With the beginnings of a world-class band in place, Lesh slowly began to assemble what has come to be called by many the best band alive today. Others will go one step further and call Phil and Friends the best band of all-time. While this is a bold statement indeed, Phil's band certainly has the credentials to back up those words.

Rob Barraco, who had spent his career performing in the Zen Tricksters, come on board in late 1999 and, like Molo, has been with Lesh ever since. Rob, an admitted long time Deadhead, brought not only his awesome tinkling of the keyboards, but also the ability to nail the vocals on many Garcia songs that Lesh had not been performing. And his knowledge of the Dead's catalogue rivaled, and at times exceeded, Lesh's

Even Lesh is quick to admit, "Well, he knows the material backwards and forwards, plus his playing is so elegant and funky at the same time; he can really be the backbone of the band. Not only that, he sometimes remembers the tunes better than I do."

Warren Haynes first played with Phil and Friends during the same tour in which Barraco joined the band. However, with duties that also included a lead role in his own band, Govt Mule, a solo career, and a reoccurring role in the Allman Brothers Band, Haynes was not available on a full-time basis. While he would eventually return to complete the core of the group, his friend Jimmy Herring had been asked to come play with Lesh in the spring of 2000.

"I got really excited hearing Jimmy play at rehearsals," Lesh recalls. "I knew he had the magic. We'll be playing along, you know, and Jimmy will just pull off some astounding musical idea, and it will be so interesting and so full of implications; it's as if he were so open to the moment and the context."

When Mule band mate Allen Woody passed away later that year, during the same time Lesh was looking to put together a more permanent cast of Friends, Haynes would return, and Phil and Friends would become a band of equals, not a merely a supporting cast for Lesh.

"When we first started rehearsing," he recalls, "in the first 30 minutes, everybody knew that it was really something special. It was beyond chemistry. Everybody in this band is adventurous enough to play outside themselves, and forget about what they know, and deal with the context of what's happening at the moment.

"We sort of settled on each other," he adds. "Everybody in the band had played with me before in a different combination. The first 30 minutes we played together, we achieved liftoff. ... It worked out really well because everybody brings a whole different sensibility. Kind of like Grateful Dead, in a way. It's the mix of roots that makes music really interesting.

"This band, and the bands that I've had, are really open to what I really want to do with music. Also, I just have more ideas now. In the sense that I set the tone, it's more or less my concept of how we play the music, how we approach it.

"What I'm enjoying now is really a heightened degree of awareness of the different places that music can go in a given context and in a split second. That's what this band of guys is doing for me."

The band's first performance came on September 21, 2000 at the Roseland Ballroom in New York in what was actually a bittersweet evening as Haynes was joined by dozens of his friends to say goodbye to his fallen band mate at the "One for Woody" benefit show. For the next two years, Lesh, Haynes, Herring, Barraco, and Molo would become known efficiently as "The Quintet."

Instantly, it was apparent that these five musicians had came across something very special. "It was the alchemy that this band has together," Lesh recalls. "In the first thirty minutes that the band played together we went to places that were new to me and very exciting. We all looked at each other after those first thirty minutes and said, 'Whoa, what was that?' It stops you cold sometimes and you have say, 'This is impossible.' Although everybody in the band had played with me in other contexts with other musicians, this was the first time they all played with me together. I just didn't want to let that go because it was the closest to the shit, the real shit that it had been, and it just keeps getting closer. Of course you never really get there but that's the fun of it because it's infinite. The higher you get it keeps receding a little farther and you keep going, keep striving for it.

Later, November 2001, when asked about the possibility of actually giving the group a name, Lesh commented, "I've thought about it. If I could come up with a name that could describe it or was eloquent enough about it I would float it to the guys in the band. People have said, 'Why don't you call it the Phil Lesh Quintet?' I like that a lot as it evokes some of the great jazz bands and in terms of rock music I think this band is on the level of any jazz band."

While they would never officially adopt that, or any other name, Phil and Friends toured heavily for two years, and also released a studio album, "There and Back Again" that found Lesh back in the studio for the first time in years.

"It was a totally different experience," he says. "After you haven't been in the studio really seriously for 13 years, the technology is bound to change, but I had no idea. I knew digital recording was a big deal, but the last time I heard about it, it was digital audio tape on big machines."

Technical challenges aside, Lesh and Friends put together an album that, while not a huge commercial success, was loudly applauded not only by his fan base on Lesh's unofficial fan-based web site Philzone.Com, but also by members of the media. While Haynes contributed heavily to the songwriting process, Lesh also enlisted the aid of long time Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, who wrote the words to six of the albums eleven tracks.

"One day, Lesh recalls, "I was working on this piece that I'd been working on a while. I changed the groove on it, just spontaneously, and it sat right up and said to me, 'I am a Robert Hunter song.'"

In the studio, the band's chemistry was equal to that it displays on stage. One listen to the Friends, and it is quickly apparent that this band features two lead guitarists in Haynes and Herring, as opposed to the Dead, where Garcia played lead and Bob Weir rhythm. Yet, Lesh sees beyond such distinctions. "Frequently there's a lead voice in the collective improvisation, but my goal is to have everybody making important contributions so that anybody can change the direction of the music at any time. To me, that's the most exhilarating and the most satisfying and the most cosmic kind of musical experience.

"I wanted everybody to be a lead player and whoever has the spotlight at the moment is the first among equals for now. Then someone else will take that position, or ideally what's created is a web of lines and relationships. That's the best way to perceive it. That's what Charlie Mingus said about his music. He said, "Focus in front of the music and listen to the whole thing, doesn't try to pick out any one strand because you'll miss the totality." That's how I ask the players to approach it.

"For me, these guys are so much more than Southern rock players. In my band, I encourage them to step outside themselves. In fact, I invite everyone who plays with me to do that. On a superficial level, you've got two guys that have played with the Allman Brothers, and they do that double lead guitar thing very well, but if you listen, I don't think it sounds anything at all like that."

Preparing for shows, which many consider to be amongst the very best live performances of all-time, Lesh says, "We'll go into it knowing that we're going to start in a certain key, or that we'll use this groove, that we'll start with this song and then see where it can take us. At this time, it's real important that the music and songs work together to tell a story, to take the listener and musicians on a journey. It's an open door to that eternal music that is always going on somewhere out there in the universe, it's an opportunity to tap into that
sense of ultimacy. The moment of doing it, that's where the real payoff is."

After two years of touring, Lesh put his "Friends" on hold for much of 2003, instead turning his attention to reuniting with his former Dead brethren, first as the Other Ones in the fall of 2002, then as The Dead for a 2003 tour that saw the addition of female vocalist Joan Osborne to the band. While that tour would draw criticism, both form fans and press alike, for "selling out" by using the name Dead for the first time since Garcia's passing, the resulting tour had many memorable moments. And more importantly, the members of the Dead were family again, having a great time playing on stage for the first time since years of well-documented business disagreements.

When The Dead's summer tour ended (rumors currently have the group playing a pair of New Year's Eve performances at the Oakland Coliseum and then another tour next summer with British rockers Yes), Phil turned his attention towards reuniting his Friends. With Haynes on the road finishing his summer duties with the Allman Brothers, Phil agreed to put together a special version of Friends that was to include guitarist John Scofield, saxophonist Branford Marsalis, and Osborne on vocals to perform a pair of special shows on the east coast in September for Terrapin Presents.

Later in the month, during a meeting outside of Yoshi's in Oakland, where we gathered to see Marsalis, Phil, and the rest of the band (except for Haynes, who flew back to New York for the evening to perform with Dave Matthews in Central Park) all spoke their dissatisfaction that those Terrapin shows were unable to occur.

"I was so looking forward to those shows," he said. "What a disappointment. Scofield is a genius, very underrated. Joan was going to be there too. That was going to be some very fine music."

As the talk turned to the early evening show Branford had just performed, talk turned to days Marsalis used to join the Dead on stage in the early 1990's, specifically March 29, 1990, a performance that resulted I in a phenomenal "Eyes of the World" that was documented on the Dead live "Without A Net" release. Marsalis, who had never even rehearses or performed with the band, wound up remaining on stage the entire second set, and returning for the encore.

"We kept Branford busy," Phil recalled. "That Nassau show was brilliant, that recording is just the best, as was Branford. That (track) made the album."

A night later, Phil and Friends would return to the stage for their first official gig in nearly a year (the band had performed half a set together at the Fillmore as part of a Govt Mule show). The band is currently back on the road for shows through the first week of December, and there is talk of perhaps returning to the studio to record a second album in the spring. Whatever the future may hold for Phil, either with this band or The Dead, there is no doubt that playing with these Friends has reenergized Phil's illustrious career. In fact, there are many who would argue that, when his final story is written, that it is his Friends, or the Quintet, if you will, that will actually become his most lasting legacy.

As he says, "The alchemy is so strong that it's almost automatic the way our group mind can open up the pipeline for that eternal music we're all trying to channel and funnel through ourselves so that it can exist in our plane.

"I'm really happy with this band. This is the one that I want to keep, definitely. I was really lucky to have the Grateful Dead to play with for thirty years. This is different, but it's just as stimulating for me as anything I've ever done.

"After my operation," this a self-described, 'Little League Dad' continues, "it seemed there was still work that I had to do, and there wasn't going to be any closure. This music needs to be reinterpreted constantly. The experience transformed me and made me realize I had to keep working - doing what I was put here to do - and realize what is really important. Become an organ donor and give blood. You can help save the life of someone you'll never even meet. Without that transplant I wouldn't be alive today.

"Even with a new liver, I will always have Hepatitis C, and have seen it flare up twice since my transplant. The first time was because of the steroids they gave me for the rejection; it took months for the numbers to stabilize. The second time, after the fall 2000 tour, I came home with a sore throat that I couldn't shake, and after a few months we discovered that I had a fungal infection. I am more susceptible to fungus infections because my long-term anti-biotic and anti-rejection medication protocols suppress my immune system. Since it took so long to identify and treat the infection, my immune system was stressed to the point that the virus flared up. A recent liver biopsy showed, however, that now my liver is doing great and my numbers are all back to normal."

In the end, Phil will always remain the consummate musician, dedicated to giving his fans, his band, and himself, the best music he can. "The challenge is to avoid yourself or what you think of as being yourself, your ego. And also the challenge is not to play what you know and what you can always bring out of the superficial level of your ability to play music."

** Originally appeared as the cover story of An Honest Tune magazine, Volume 5, #1

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